In May 1991 four musicians walked into Morrisound Recording in Tampa and walked out a few weeks later with thirty four minutes of music. Death's Human arrived on Relativity Records on 22 October that year, produced by Scott Burns with Chuck Schuldiner: eight songs, the longest of them four minutes and thirty nine seconds. It has sold somewhere around ninety four thousand copies in the United States. Small numbers. The record still rearranged what a death metal band was allowed to do with its hands.
Technical death metal usually gets dated from that session, and the dating is arguable by a year in either direction. The founding date is not the interesting part. The change is. Death metal had spent five years proving it could be unbearable, and from 1990 onward a handful of bands set about proving it could be played, at the same tempo, through the same tone, with none of the agreements that let a room move together. If you want the whole family standing side by side, that is the subgenres explained. This is about one branch of it, and about the precise thing that branch does to you.
What the word actually claims
Technical is a claim about density and about nothing else. It says that a bar of this music carries more information than a bar of ordinary death metal: more notes, more changes of chord, more changes of meter, more independence between the four people holding the thing up. It does not claim the songs are long. It does not claim they have a shape you can follow home. A great deal of the most technical death metal ever recorded runs under four minutes and stops without resolving anything at all.
Take an ordinary death metal riff first, because the difference only shows against it. Four beats. A tremolo figure on the low string, a stop, the same figure again. The drummer blasts, the bass doubles the bottom note of the guitar, and every man in the machine agrees where the count starts, which is what lets a floor of bodies move as one animal. The genre spent its first years perfecting that agreement, and the whole of it, the studios and the scenes and the records, sits in the summary of everything.
Technical death metal takes the agreement away and keeps the violence. The tool of the early scene was the maul, swung with both hands at something that could not move out of the way. What turned up around 1990 was a scalpel worked at the same speed, and it cuts in three places.
The three cuts
The first is meter. A technical riff is written in a phrase length that will not divide into four: seven, or five, or eleven, or a block of twenty three eighth notes that behaves like one long bar. Play it twice and the accent has walked to a different place. Your head goes hunting for the downbeat, fails to find it, and hands the job back to your ears. That is the intention, not a side effect.
The second is harmony. Ordinary death metal moves in semitones and tritones, because those two intervals are where the dread lives. The technical wing went to diminished shapes instead, notes stacked in minor thirds that belong to no key and therefore offer nowhere to rest, thrown out as string-skipped arpeggios rather than chugged on the bottom string. Nothing inside a diminished arpeggio tells you where home is. That is not decoration. It is the last handrail being unbolted from the wall.
The third is the bass. In 1987 a death metal bass player existed to thicken the guitar and was mixed accordingly. Steve DiGiorgio turned up to Human with a fretless instrument and played lines that argue with the guitar instead of shadowing it, sliding between pitches down in a register nobody had bothered listening to. Once the bass is a voice, the harmony gets pushed from two directions at once, and the record stops being a wall and starts being a disagreement.
The genre spent five years perfecting an agreement about where the beat was. The technical wing broke that agreement deliberately and kept the tempo exactly where it had been.
The record that set the terms
The band that cut Human was assembled for the job. Schuldiner brought in Paul Masvidal on second guitar and Sean Reinert on drums, both of them out of Cynic and both of them thinking in phrases that had nothing to do with the Tampa house style, then added DiGiorgio on bass, and the four of them recorded a set of songs in which the riffs move by fragments instead of by repetition. Listen to what happens under the vocal on "Flattening of Emotions". The guitars state a figure, alter one interval inside it, and state it again, so that you never quite get the thing you were promised ten seconds earlier. "Cosmic Sea" throws the vocal out altogether and lets the two guitars trade for three minutes.
There is a coda that tells you what the industry thought all this was worth. When Relapse Records reissued the album in 2011 the original master tapes could not be produced, because Sony had lost them, and the record had to be remixed by Jim Morris from what survived. The most consequential technical death metal album of its decade sat in a vault until the vault forgot it was there.
Dissonance is not the same as difficulty
Here is where most explanations of this music go wrong. Density and dissonance are two different arguments, and the Quebec four who proved it took the best part of a decade to get the record out. Gorguts released Obscura through Olympic Recordings on 23 June 1998, cut at Studio Victor in Montreal and produced by the band with Pierre Remillard, with Luc Lemay and Steeve Hurdle on guitars, Steve Cloutier on bass and Patrick Robert on drums. The guitars are detuned until the strings go slack, chords are voiced so that two notes a semitone apart ring together and refuse to settle, and whole passages are tapped rather than picked, so the notes arrive with no attack on them, like something dredged up through a floor.
None of that is difficult in the way a sweep arpeggio is difficult. It is difficult to write and difficult to sit through, and it opened a second front that runs through Ulcerate, Portal and everyone since filed under dissonant death metal. The German band who called themselves Obscura in 2002 took the name off this sleeve. That is the measure of it: a commercial failure that ended up naming its own successors.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The sweep era and the machine
The generation after solved a different problem, which was that nobody would play this material with them. Muhammed Suicmez founded Necrophagist in Germany in 1992 and spent seven years unable to hold a line-up together, so in 1999 he recorded Onset of Putrefaction on his own with a drum machine, layering guitars and bass by himself, and the inhuman evenness of the result is not a flaw in the record, it is the whole character of it. The remaster Willowtip and Relapse issued in 2004 had Hannes Grossmann play real drums over the original guitar tracks. Epitaph followed the same year, the band toured it hard, and then nothing: no third album, a statement in 2016 that the band was dead, and a set of sweep-picked arpeggio patterns that every guitarist in the genre has since had to sit down and learn.
What that generation added was continuous motion. There is no rest inside a Necrophagist song, no bar where the guitar holds a chord and lets you catch up, and once a music removes its own resting points the only variable left is speed. Archspire took that to the end of the road. Bleed the Future, produced by Dave Otero at Flatline Studios in Denver and released by Season of Mist on 29 October 2021, runs thirty one minutes and thirty three seconds, reached number seven on the American Heatseekers chart, took the 2022 Juno award for metal album of the year, and delivers its vocals at a rate that turns a human voice into a percussion instrument. Two and a half years of writing for half an hour of music.
That is the branch, from the scalpel to the machine. Who actually carried it, decade by decade, from the Florida bands through the Canadians and the Germans to the current crop, is the business of technical Death Metal Bands. Bring a clear head to it. None of this was written to be nodded along to.
